I'm working on a more substantive post about the
Death Note manga series, but as I flip through the various volumes to review for it, I'm just gobsmacked at the attention to detail where clothing is concerned. I haven't read enough other titles to know if that's unique to this series or a more general manga thing, but what I do know is that I've never seen anything approaching it in any western comics.
Artist Takeshi Obata speaks to this directly in his Vol. 13 production notes about series protagonist Light Yagami:
I spent a lot of effort on his clothes. I couldn't even imagine what kind of clothes a brilliant person would wear, so this part was very difficult. I used a lot of fashion magazines for reference when I was coming up with ideas. I thought of him as a slim and smart guy who wears a formal shirt. I tried to avoid casual clothes like jeans; most of what he wears is fitted.
We first see Light in his school uniform, which is about as generic as you'd expect:
But here's a sweatered version he also sports, relaxed once he's home:
Sharp as hell in a suit:
Notice the detailing in his tennis outfit:
The contrasting sleeves and stripe around the collar go an extra mile or two from what I'm used to seeing in western comics. And then, afterward, he throws on warm-up pants and jacket that build further on the look:
That's not the only exercise apparel he sports, either. Here he is in a dark hooded track suit with white stripe:
Smart wardrobe choices by Obata really help sell Light as a smart, fashionable young man. Like this nicely detailed western shirt, complete with contrasting yoke and piping:
Or this ribbed half-zip mock-neck sweater:
My favorite outfit of his comes late in the series, partly because I just like it, and partly because so much attention is paid to the way people wear clothes a little differently in different contexts. In the airport, he wears it all tucked-in and buttoned-up, with jacket:
Once he's ensconced at his destination, he loses the jacket, pulls it out, and loosens buttons at top, bottom, and cuffs:
This was a fun post to put together. I may do similar ones for Misa and another character or two, all of whom are supplied by Obata with just as meticulously detailed wardrobes as Light.
5 comments:
I enjoyed seeing that. The detail is very impressive.
Please do one for one of the female characters as well; I'd be interested to see if the same detail is carried over.
Enjoyed the post, and writing a giant comment, as I always latch on to costume in manga...
Yes, Obata is a great costume designer, unique among the shounen mangaka I've read. I've seen plenty of showy, cool designs, but very little of this kind of relatively subtle attention to what characters wear and what it says about them. (Hiroaki Samura's Blade of the Immortal is one of the few series that measures up; his outfits are totally implausible and flamboyant, but it all makes sense in the context of the characters and their world.)
Misa's clothes are sometimes the best indication in a given scene that this awkwardly written character might have an inner life. You can tell that Obata wasn't just thinking "draw a cute goth"; he was thinking "an attention-seeking but genuinely stylish person." I also enjoy the gradations of her clothes -- classic white Docs are as close as she gets to businesswear, and then there's the over-the-top outfit she wears to meet Light for the first time. Despite fitting the Misa template, it doesn't entirely seem to fit her style in the rest of the series -- it's too overtly sexy, too insubstantial, too monochromatic and too suggestive of a costume. She's dressed like an awkward combination of showgirl and fairy, and she doesn't seem to care if it's cold outside so long as Light sees her as she wants to be seen.
As for L, his monocostume is all the more striking in contrast to Light's stylishness and awareness of his own face and figure. Obata's intent with him was overtly "a person who doesn't care about fashion," but L is otherwise so aware of the effect he produces on people that I think his uniform has had some thought put into it. To my mind, a guy who doesn't care about fashion has five different shirts which he wears when they are clean; for formal occasions he has some khakis and for sports he has some sweatpants. A guy with one shirt (or five identical shirts) has consciously thought at some point, "fashion is irrelevant to me and I want you to know that; if it embarrasses you and throws you off guard on formal or sporting occasions, my stylish arch-frenemy, then all the better."
Later in the series, I think Obata starts to get lazy, but it could also simply be that the first generation of characters want to present themselves as mature and dress less flashily (though still dress very well, as in Light's rad suit in your example). Mello, conversely, doesn't change his clothes by day, only by timejump, and he has weird (and imo kind of awful) taste which might or might not be intentional. I don't know what he's trying to convey with that black jumpsuit in his first scene except that Obata didn't have him figured out yet. Maybe he's just into dance.
Wow, RF, great points all around--thanks for chiming in! I'm just finishing a post on Misa, and will be interested to hear your take.
I wouldn't say it's a general manga thing. Certainly not typical in shonen...it may be a yaoi thing? Which is pretty much what Death Note is, really.
I think Obata just really likes drawing fashion. Plus it must be a good way to keep from getting bored with drawing page after page of two guys thinking at each other.
I love the Death Note series and this is one of the reasons!
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